Twelfth Night

Kara Tointon and Adrian Edmonson star in Christopher Luscombe’s sumptuous and enjoyable production of Shakespeare’s comedy of unrequited love.

Twelfth Night is a tale of unrequited love – hilarious and heartbreaking. Twins are separated in a shipwreck, and forced to fend for themselves in a strange land. The first twin, Viola, falls in love with Orsino, who dotes on OIivia, who falls for Viola but is idolised by Malvolio. Enter Sebastian, who is the spitting image of his twin sister…

Christopher Luscombe, director of the ‘glorious’ (Daily Telegraph) Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing (2014 and 2016), returns to the Royal Shakespeare Company to tackle Shakespeare’s greatest comedy, a brilliantly bittersweet account of “the whirligig of time”. Adrian Edmondson (Bottom, The Young Ones) appears as Malvolio and Kara Tointon (ITV’s Mr Selfridge and Sound of Music Live!) plays Olivia.

I don’t like to sound superficial but, heavens, this does look lovely. The RSC, not usually one to overindulge audiences with its sets or costumes, has gone all-out on a sumptuous design (three cheers for Simon Higlett) that positively drips with opulence, as this most bittersweet of Shakespeare’s comedies is updated to the Aesthetic Movement’s heyday of the 1890s. The RSC production budget for the rest of the decade must surely have been blown. Christopher Luscombe, whose transpositions of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado to just before and after WW1 were warmly received, oversees a production that is confident, light-on its-feet and at the more rumbustiously populist end of the RSC scale. Fiona Mountford, The Evening Standard

Tickets: Full £19 Adult concessions £17 18 & under £10Running time: To be confirmedDoors open: 6.30pmCertificate: This screening is certified 12A As Live. Click here for more information.